WHITE ORANGE – WHITE ORANGE

It’s no surprise that Portland, OR band’s White Orange is fronted/fully finessed by a hands-on studio owner and full-time acid-axe victim. Adam Pike sits in the corner of Pac NW’s rock dungeon basement, egg-shell sheets all over the incense-drenched walls, orange crates of the most lysergic-infused hallucination-crunch hard psyche LPs near his feet, as he plays with some gimmicks box and weird tuning and drops long cigarette ashes into the denim cuff of his greasy jeans. His self-titled nine track White Orange album easily shows why his Toadhouse Recording House skills are in such frenetic demand: Any raunch riff-based band (for example, Red Fang, Norska, Rabbits) would crave to sound this futurist and primitive-brutal all at once. Pike is a Sinatra of the dummy-headed bad-trip existential vocal, spinning turgid journeys through The Sword and Nebula style virtual reality doom stomp. Contemporary artists of this style often have the licks, but don’t have the bottom end; White Orange cranks and throbs deep inside the crust of the lurch-groove (“Middle Of The Riddle”), then sprightly trills into pure cosmic pop pleasuring (“Dinosaur Bones”).